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First of all, I want to let you all know that my short story, “Trying to Stay Dead”, is now live on Psuedopod. You should check it out here. Enjoy!

Second, it’s that time of year again: National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), when tens of thousands of people around the world spend the month frantically scribbling away, trying to get 50,000 words by November 30. And again, I’m one of those people. And again, my wife and I are raising funds for the Office of Letters and Light, a worthy organization that promotes creativity among adults and children via programs like National Novel Writing Month, the Young Writers Program, and so on. If we raise $1000, Jennifer and I promise to do an interpretive dance to “Also Sprach Zarathustra”, with our cats. To donate, go here.

Hm. I think that’s all, for now. Happy Halloween! Etc.!

Current Mood:  bouncy

We got Checkers when she was three years old, and she was a small bundle of nerves. She hid in a box in her foster home’s spare bedroom, and we had to chase her to get her into the carrier we’d brought with us. We knew going into this that she was a neurotic cat, but we were used to cats with issues.

When we got her home, we put her carrier into the library and she immediately ran and hid behind the books. For days we barely saw her, though we have pictures of her peering out at us between books of Lovecraft stories (I really wanted to make a lolcat with one of these pictures and caption it, “Lovecraftian Cat Lurks In The Library”, but we figured not many people would get the joke).

For weeks, she stayed in the library. Then she moved to the linen closet, and that became her new lurking spot. It was a good spot for her, because it was unmolested by the other cats, and it was easy for us to play with her. She didn’t play much at that point, but she did enjoy catching her claws on a dangled shoestring.

Eventually, she moved on from the linen closet to the office. It was here that she and I connected, as much as we did. She hid on one of the shelves, behind one of our miniature gargoyles. I’d throw small toys at her — sparkle balls were her favorites — and she would bap them back at me. This game could go on for hours. And every now and then, when I would walk into the office, she would throw one of her toys at me to get my attention for another round. We were becoming buddies. But then she started to pee on my desk, and the time I caught her doing it — I picked her up quickly and darted to the litter box — more or less marked the end of our relationship. She didn’t throw the toys at me anymore after that, and she became less enthusiastic about the toy bapping game.

When we moved to our house in Sacramento, she quickly marked out the lower level as hers. We never saw her upstairs. She didn’t interact with the other cats, and we joked that she would have preferred to be an only child. She was happy like this, living downstairs, spending most of her time on top of one of the cat trees, occasionally (and only half-heartedly) playing the toy bapping game with me.

Jennifer noticed that Checkers was losing weight and becoming lethargic, so we took the cat to the vet, who found tumors in her intestines and diagnosed her with lymphoma. She wasn’t in pain, the vet said, and there were some pills that might hopefully shrink the tumors. We tried the pills — or, rather, Jennifer tried, because there was no way Checkers would let me near enough to pop a pill down her throat. Soon Jennifer was unable to administer the pills either, so she took Checkers back in for a shot that would hopefully do the same thing.

It didn’t work.

We came home from a play late Saturday night, and Jennifer found Checkers lying under the bed. She’d thrown up, and was struggling to breathe. We bundled her up in a thick towel and headed off to the emergency veterinary hospital so that they could administer the last relief, but it was too late. Checkers died in Jennifer’s arms. Tearfully we left her body at the vet’s for disposal — there simply isn’t room in our back yard at this point.

Checkers’s death was a milestone of sorts for me. She wasn’t the first of our cats to die, but she was the first of the cats that Jennifer and I chose together after our marriage. So even though she and I did not get along that well (aside from that brief time in the office in our old house), I miss her. She used to yell at us from downstairs whenever we put out wet food for the cats, and now that hollering has been silenced, and it’s hard. It’s strange to go downstairs, look at the cat tree where she used to lurk, and not see her there.

So long, Checkers. I’ll miss you.

This is a quick review of a comic book by a guy who doesn’t typically read comic books.

Not that I’m a total ignoramus when it comes to comic books and graphic novels. I’m a big fan of the Sandman series by Neil Gaiman, as well as the Preacher series by Garth Ennis, and I love Fables by Bill Willingham. I’ve read Watchmen, and several issues of The Walking Dead. During the 80s I climbed aboard the Dark Knight bandwagon, and for awhile I was enthralled by everything that Frank Miller did.

But when it comes to Superman, Spiderman, Batman, the Fantastic Four and so on? I have to admit that I just don’t bother. These comics have been going on for so long and have storylines so complicated and all the titles are so tied in with each other that I figured I’d never have a prayer of simply picking one up and figuring out what’s going on, let alone getting engaged in the story. What is the meaning of this bit of dialogue Superman says in JLA #252? Well, it requires that you know what happened in Wonder Woman #’s 159 through 182. That sort of thing.

So when DC Comics announced that they were rebooting fifty-two of their titles, starting over from scratch, I was kind of excited. Of course, the part of me that thinks that reboots, reimaginings, remakes, and very likely to be bad ideas in general was skeptical. But what the heck: since I’d never kept up with the titles, perhaps this reboot was the perfect time for me to start reading comics fresh, getting in on the ground floor, and understanding what’s going on without having to go and borrow my buddy’s complete collection and spend a year doing nothing but getting caught up. This, I thought, was my chance.

So I called Big Brother Comics in downtown Sacramento to reserve a copy of Justice League #1, and during my lunch break I walked down to pick it up (during my walk I dodged a bicyclist, tripped over a curb, and ripped a hole in the knee of my favorite jeans — but that’s another story). It sat on my desk at work mocking me for a few hours until I was able to get it home and read it.

Now, despite my relative ignorance of comic books, I have been exposed to Batman and Superman, but this is a total reboot and so I tried to read this with the perspective of someone who’d never read anything about these characters.

First impressions, then. Well, it’s kind of short. This guy who’s dressed up in heavy-duty armor with bat ears is fighting something that appears to be an alien (it breathes fire and has an ugly face, so it must be an alien) in the downtown of some large city, when a guy in green shows up. The first character, we learn quickly, is Batman. The second is Green Lantern. The city is Gotham City. Oh, and all this is taking place five years ago, when no one knew what a superhero is. Though Green Lantern and Batman seem to know each other.

The two of them talk while Batman continues to fight this alien monster. We learn that Green Lantern is kind of a pompous jerk, and Batman is a grumpy sourpuss. We also learn that Green Lantern is part of a galactic corps of Green Lanterns, and he’s responsible for the sector of space that includes Earth, which is why he was drawn to Gotham City: the alien attack that Batman was warding off.

But this alien — who lets out some sort of warcry just before blowing up, I won’t reveal exactly what — is not alone on Earth. Green Lantern reveals that there is at least one other alien on Earth that needs to be investigated: some dude in the city of Metropolis who goes by the moniker Superman. Green Lantern, powered by his magic space ring, believes he can take down Superman if necessary. Batman isn’t so sure. Guess who’s right?

Anyway. I enjoyed Justice League #1. It was a worthy purchase. Will I keep on buying comics in the rebooted DC universe, and try to keep up with all of the new stories? I’m not sure. Jennifer took a look at Justice League sitting on our dining room table and asked, “So are you going to start collecting comic books now?” to which I replied, “I doubt it.” But I think I’m going to buy a couple more next week when the next round of old/new titles are released.

We’ll see.

This past weekend we flew up to Washington to visit Jennifer’s sister and her husband and daughter. It was an enjoyable time; I like my sister-in-law and her family, and my niece F (not her real name) is a blast to hang out with.

A few highlights:

• During the flight up, one of the passengers in first class proposed to a flight attendant over the in-flight loudspeaker. To make it sound less weird, the attendant was off-duty and flying up to Seattle on her own business in economy, and not one of the attendants who was working the flight. I also got the impression that the passenger and the flight attendant had actually been dating for awhile, so this wasn’t a random proposal.
• Saturday was a relatively laid back day. After watching F in her diving class (she’s quite skilled for her age), we had lunch at Claim Jumper, then went to Borders to pick over the remains of their stock. I picked up How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu, The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont, and Peter & Max: A Fables Novel by Bill Willingham (the creator of the Fables graphic novel series, and an all around nice guy).
• Sunday we went to the Pacific Science Museum to see their special exhibit on fear. It was there that I learned about the Amygdala and its role in the fear response to danger. I decided then and there that the amygdala is my favorite brain structure. For most of my life, it was Broca’s area, but this exhibit changed my mind.
• There was nothing exciting about the flight back, except that I started reading How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and Jennifer read the entirety of The Hunger Games on my Kindle. The whole thing. Yes, she reads that fast.

And that’s about it, really. That’s two weekends in a row that we went out of town for some fun. At this point, we don’t have any trips planned until February, so our weekends promise to be dull until then.

(On another note: This weekend is Dragon*Con. Those of you who are attending, please have a wretched, awful time. This will make me less jealous of you.)

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
by Charles Yu
Vintage, 2011

After a couple of people at WorldCon recommended How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe to me, I decided to give it a shot. I’d seen it on the shelves, after all, and the premise looked interesting. I love stories about time travel, paradoxes, that sort of thing (Doctor Who is one of my favorite TV shows — ’nuff said), so a novel that features that sort of thing should be right up my alley.

And, on the whole, it was. I can’t honestly say that this was the best book of the year, as some reviewers have said; but, then, I haven’t read that many new books this year. This novel has its comic moments (though I would probably have listed Vonnegut and Fforde as the antecedents of this novel’s humor, rather than Douglas Adams, as one of the reviewers cited on the cover did), not to mention moments of poignancy and near tragedy. I’m a fan of wordplay, and Yu incorporates a lot of that as well, with techno-babble which is obviously not meant to be taken seriously and a (very) few well-considered puns. There’s a lot here to like.

So the question I have for myself is, why didn’t I enjoy this novel more? Why would I give How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe three stars instead of four or five?

I think it’s partially because it was a chore to get into this book initially. There’s a lot of exposition in the beginning; cleverly written exposition, to be sure, but exposition nonetheless, that tells us about how time travel works in Yu’s universe. He tells us about how the vagaries of human emotions — particularly nostalgia — play into how time travel works, and in why people go to the trouble of traveling through time. These are important ideas for Yu to get across to the reader because they are important to understanding the novel’s underlying theme, but the technobabble — and remember, I love technobabble — got on my nerves. I found myself rolling my eyes and muttering, “Again?” at certain passages. By the time I reached the midpoint of the novel, which is where it really begins and the plot clicks to “activate”, I was more annoyed than amused. Of course, once the plot did click in, then the novel, with the themes and ideas that had been developed in the first half, really shone. In short, I felt the first half of the book could have been cut by, oh, at least half, probably three-quarters, without losing the important ideas that are developed thematically in the rest of the book.

The second half of the book is more enjoyable, with its meta-fictional devices and its evocation of time loops and the Ontological Paradox (which just happens to be my favorite of the time travel paradoxes), but still far too reminiscent of Vonnegut for me to feel like there was a lot of originality here. Don’t get me wrong here: I like Vonnegut, and I grant that it’s very hard to evoke him without sounding like a pastiche, and Yu manages to do that here. Still, I wish there were more Yu and less Vonnegut in this novel. And I wish I could make this paragraph make more sense than that.

In short, then: I did enjoy How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and would recommend it to other people looking for comedic science fiction, though I’d offer some caveats (e.g., “Just stick with it through the first half, I promise it’ll work out”). But would I call it a masterpiece of the genre? I’m not certain. I think it’s flawed, but shows promise. I know that Yu will publish more novels, and I know that I will read them.

Take a look at the images from Cosplay for a Cause gallery. There’s some great creativity and talent in these costumes, of course, but there’s also a lot of cleavage and hourglass figures. Don’t think that I object to cleavage and hourglass figures, because I don’t. I just wonder about expectations.

What do you think? Do these images set unrealistic expectations for women who want to cosplay themselves? For how women in the “geek community” should look if they want to be taken seriously by others, especially men?

Or am I over-thinking this?

Today, GeekFeminism.org ran a thought-provoking article entitled, “‘Geek girls’ and the problem of self-objectification“. It’s worth a read, especially if you’re interested in issues of geekery and feminism.

There’s a lot of sexism in geek culture. We geeks, nerds, dorks, whatever, like to believe that we have overcome the various prejudices and hangups that exist in the society at large, just because, say, we read Heinlein’s books and enjoyed his stories of alternate sexualities. But the sexism persists nevertheless: whether it’s a booth babe being ogled by a fan or a woman computer scientist receiving death threats for her comments on a tech forum, it’s there. The objectification is there, just as it exists in society at large.

But the question that Geek Feminism raises is how much of that objectification is “self-objectification”; that is, how much are women in geek culture (specifically, women who cosplay at conventions) buying into the notion that they have to look sexy in order to be accepted as a member of that culture? Take a look at this spoof PSA starring Kaley Cuoco:

Are the women who dress up at Slave Leia doing so because they enjoy feeling sexy and beautiful? Or are they doing it because they are objectifying themselves in a culture which rewards that behavior? Chatting with @HelloTheFuture on Twitter yesterday was certainly helpful for my thought processes in this regard. Certainly there are women who dress up in terrific cosplay outfits because they genuinely enjoy the attention, being sexy and attractive, winning costume contests, and so on. But how many of them do it because they feel they won’t even be taken seriously as a woman or even as a geek unless they dress and act in a way that panders to male expectations of what women should be? There are “booth babes” who are objectified in this manner, that’s for sure.

I’m still working out my feelings on this matter. I do know that however a woman dresses, that decision is hers and we shouldn’t judge her for it.

I don’t know. What do you think? What are your opinions?

So, that was my first WorldCon. And now I’m back.

All in all, I had a blast. It was different than what I’m used to, con-wise: the last con I was at was Dragon*Con 2006. And before that, Dragon*Con 2005. And before that, Dragon*Con 2001. Dragon*Con is a very different beast than WorldCon is. Since Dragon*Con focuses on a wider range of media, such as movies and television, than WorldCon does, there are panels on just about every corner of fandom. And there are costumes. Everywhere, costumes. Superhero costumes, Star Wars costumes, Star Trek costumes, and so on. Day and night, all over the con, you’ll see people in costumes of all sorts. Honestly, that’s one of the things I really enjoy about Dragon*Con.

WorldCon, by contrast, is a more “literary” con, focusing on the written word to the near exclusion of other forms of media. While there were panels about television shows such as Doctor Who, Stargate: Universe, and The Big Bang Theory, most panels are about books and topics in written science fiction and fantasy. The guests for WorldCon are generally authors, editors, and artists, while Dragon*Con has guests from television and movies as well. For example, you might find Leonard Nimoy or Nathan Fillion at Dragon*Con, but not at WorldCon. At WorldCon, you’re more likely to run into Tim Powers, David Brin, Connie Willis, and so on.

And WorldCon is much smaller than Dragon*Con. The last time I was at Dragon*Con, there were over 40,000 people attending. At this past WorldCon, there were something like 4,000. It’s a more intimate con — though other people, such as Tim Pratt, who prefer even smaller cons, might disagree — and you’re more likely to run into the guests in the hallways. I bumped into John Scalzi just outside of his panel on his trip to the Creation Museum and shook his hand; I also talked briefly to Paul Cornell, one of the writers for Doctor Who. Pretty darn cool, if you ask me.

Some highlights:

• The panel with Brother Guy Consulmagno, a Jesuit brother who works at the Vatican Observatory, was absolutely brilliant, and was probably my favorite panel of the entire con. I enjoyed hearing about his views on religion, science, and the intersection of the two, and how history and politics have shaped that relationship. Consulmagno is a funny, engaging speaker, and utterly brilliant as well. The fact that Paul Cornell, a writer for Doctor Who (which is a fantastic show, in case you aren’t watching it), was the interviewer made the panel even more brilliant.
• At the same panel, I found myself sitting next to and chatting with Bill Willingham, possibly my favorite comic book writer (after Neil Gaiman); you owe it to yourself to check out Fables, his wonderful graphic novel series. He’s a neat guy, and I definitely enjoyed his company. I desperately wanted to ask him if he would join me for a beer or coffee or something, but I’m afraid I couldn’t work up the nerve. He would probably have said no, but I still should have asked.
• The very first panel that Jennifer and I attended was John Scalzi‘s presentation on his trip to the Creation Museum. Scalzi, too, is an engaging and funny speaker, and his descriptions of the so-called “science” behind the Creation Museum were hilarious. I admit that toward the end I was beginning to wonder whether the Creation Museum is honestly meant to be taken seriously or whether it’s meant to parody Creationists in general, but I’m assured that they’re sincere. Which is depressing, to say the least.
• I met up with two on-line friends, Erin Hartshorn and Margaret Fisk, neither of whom I’ve never met in person before, which was fun, even if I didn’t get much of a chance to talk to them.
• Running into old friends. Running into new friends. That’s always a blast.
• The writers’ workshop was very useful (of course you know I had to sign up for that). The two moderators — Dani Kollin and Richard Chwedyk compared my writing style (in my story, “Teh K1ng in Y3110w”) to that of Terry Pratchett, the sort of compliment that can make me glow for days. On the other hand, they pointed out some flaws that I had with craft, and they delivered these criticisms in a way that made me eager to get back to my keyboard to fix the flaws and get that story sent out the door again.

So… All in all, I really enjoyed WorldCon. I probably won’t go again any time soon (WorldCon is a traveling con, and next year it will be in Chicago), but there are definitely other cons that will be nearby that I’ll be attending. I’m so glad I went… and so annoyed that I had to come back home, to reality, and to work.

I’ve come to realize that the trim, charming, well-rounded Renaissance man inside of me is probably never going to see the light of day.

Current Mood:  thoughtful

In case you haven’t seen it, here is artist Adam Winnik’s lovely animation of Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot. The voice, of course, is Sagan himself reading from his book. Watch the video, be impressed both by the animation and by the concepts.

The takeaway message from this video is obvious: Everything that has ever happened in human history, from the Peloponnesian War to the first time you fell in love, has all happened on this tiny little speck of dust called Earth.

Perspective, eh? Sagan was a master of it. He blew my mind when I was watching Cosmos in high school, and he continues to blow my mind, nearly fifteen years after his death.